A drone’s eye look at Paradise Garden

Beginning within the mid-’70s on a serene street around the borders of Summerville, the late Howard Finster-an old Baptist minister and self-announced “man of visions”-produced 46,991 individually numbered outsider artworks focused on God on the four-acre compound dubbed Paradise Garden. Moored through the five-story “World’s Folk Art Church,” the home includes a tower of hubcaps and vines, structures full of his idiosyncratic works of art, along with a mosaic garden by which a large number of found objects-from bits of damaged plates to discarded spectacles-take root in concrete mounds. Now almost completely restored, Paradise Garden draws 6,000 visitors annually to northwest Georgia using the lure to find meaning in Finster’s mysticism. Elevation: 26 ft

Photograph by So Fly Pictures

This short article initially made an appearance within our June 2016 issue.